I Own Three NFTs from Projects That Don’t Exist Anymore and They’re Just Broken Links Now
Bought them in 2021 thinking they’d hold value. Projects disappeared, their servers shut down, now my NFTs just show error messages where the images should be.
The tokens still exist on-chain proving I own something. But the actual art and metadata live on dead servers controlled by teams that moved on. So I own receipts for nothing.
That’s the fundamental flaw with most NFT projects. The token is on-chain but everything that makes it valuable lives on centralized storage that can disappear anytime.
Vanar’s Neutron compression addresses this by making it affordable to store the actual NFT data on-chain as Seeds instead of pointing to IPFS or AWS. Your art exists on validators permanently, not on some startup’s server that might shut down next year.
Williams Racing partnering with them makes sense for sports collectibles and fan tokens. Racing teams want digital assets that outlive individual seasons or sponsorship deals. Permanent on-chain storage means collectibles retain value beyond the team’s current operations.
I’m curious whether NFT projects actually migrate to true on-chain storage or if cheap centralized hosting keeps winning despite the obvious risks we’ve already seen play out repeatedly.
Do your NFTs actually store data on-chain or just point to servers that could disappear?
